We study causal effects of two early retirement reforms. Reform 1 (NRA) increased normal retirement age stepwise from 60 to 63. Simultaneously, it became possible to use early retirement with benefit discounts. Reform 2 (ERA) increased the age of early retirement stepwise from 60 to 63. We...

We investigate the causal effect of age at migration on subsequent educational attainment in the destination country. To identify the causal effect we compare the educational attainment of siblings at age 21, exploiting the fact that they typically migrate at different ages within a given...

Using long-running data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984-2012) we investigate the impact of paternal unemployment on child labor market and education outcomes. We first describe correlation patterns and then use sibling fixed effects and the Gottschalk (1996) method to identify the...

This paper studies the association between the unemployment experience of fathers and their sons. Based on German survey data that cover the last decades we find significant positive correlations. Using instrumental variables estimation and the Gottschalk (1996) method we investigate to what...

We investigate the responsiveness of individual retirement decisions to changes in financial incentives. The causal effect is identified based on the natural experiment generated by an institutional reform. The results of a binary retirement model are robust to alternative model specifications,...

This paper summarizes the findings of studies which investigate the determinants of wages in Germany, using data of the German Socioeconomic Panel (GSOEP). The empirical analyses apply least squares estimates as well as the estimators developed by Altonji and Shakotko (1987) and Topel (1991)....